DivX Releases Version 5.2
By Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen - Posted Sep 8, 2004
In late July, DivXNetworks, Inc. announced the release of version 5.2 of its codec, offering a built-in bitrate calculator, a new fast encoding mode, and support for French, German, and Japanese in addition to English—a move that points to the international nature of the company's market.
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"About 75% of our traffic and two-thirds of our revenue are from outside the United States," says Kevin Hell, DivX's chief marketing officer and managing director. "The DivX brand is appealing to the European market, since (co-founder) Jerome ‘Gej' Rota is from France, and there's a lot more anti-Microsoft sentiment over there." Worldwide, DivX claims 120 million downloads of the three versions of its codec: DivX, the free encoder, decoder, and player; DivX Pro, the $19.99 advanced encoding tool; and Dr. DivX 9 (now in version 1.0.5), a $49.99 consumer-targeted suite that includes DivX Pro.
Hell says that DivX's internal testing shows that DivX 5.2 offers "33-38%" better encoding quality, defined by signal-to-noise ratio, and 300% faster encoding speed than Microsoft Windows Media Video 9, though no independent tests are yet available. But compression efficiency has always been the name of DivX's game—it's always touted the codec's ability to deliver full-length DVD-quality movies within the 700MB storage limits of a CD—so it's no surprise that it once again forms the core of 5.2's marketing pitch.
Beyond the promises of improved image quality and encoding times, DivX 5.2 offers several improvements over 5.1:
• Adaptive single and multiple consecutive B-frames, which allow the encoder to save space by only encoding the differences between preceding and subsequent frames (i.e. "talking head" shots where the background stays constant).
• Multiple quantization metrics, which apply different bitrates to different types of video streams (i.e., animation vs. live-action). For the most part, DivX uses H.263 quantization, which is designed for a wide range of bitrates, but 5.2 adds MPEG-2 quantization, which is particularly efficient for high-bitrate encoding.
• Automatic update downloading.
Beyond its high efficiency, the core of DivX's business strategy has been the company's aggressive pursuit of the consumer electronics space; at the same time it's worked hard to establish itself in more traditional, PC-based streaming. DivX-certified set-top players are available from KiSS, Philips, JVC, Samsung, and others, and the Plextor ConvertX encoding device bridges the PC-CE gap.
In the European market, DivX recently announced an agreement with Wind, an Italian telecommunications company, for secure, video-on-demand delivery over IP. The VoD service uses progressive download rather than "pure streaming," an approach that corporate communications manager Tom Huntington says was based on consumer preferences. "Customers face the trade-off between watching something right away or letting it buffer a bit and getting a higher-quality video, and they clearly prefer the latter," he says. "If you're going to lay out up to $15 (for premium content) you want to make sure it's at least what you get when you go to Blockbuster and rent a DVD."
DivX movies are also now available on Alaska Airlines flights via the APS digEplayer VoD playback device, and Huntington says more airline partnerships are in the works. "We feel the appearance of these kinds of devices validates the ‘iPod' version of video," Huntington says.
The company also has been running its own VoD service, which Huntington says includes 17,500 titles from 40 content partners. At this point, it's mostly independent, anime, and adult content, with "rental" rates ranging from $1.95 for five days to $14.99 for 30 days of viewing on a consumer's PC. Why the lack of big-name titles? "The indie and adult folks are moving a lot more aggressively from a DRM perspective," Huntington says, "but their success will help more studios get comfortable with the technology, both from an encoding and a DRM perspective. We've already had films from Warner Brothers and Disney go through our encoding facility."
